Appearing next to the failed climate bill's ardent enemy US Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) in Charleston, West Virginia last week, Chu triumphantly told his Big Coal listeners that he would "save coal" by investing billions into still infeasible, prohibitively expensive, unproven and fanciful carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.

Why? As Big Coal is banking, should some magical breakthrough ever make CCS feasible in the next 10-20 years, coal mining production would INCREASE by 20-30 percent, in order to handle the increased energy demands of capturing, compressing, piping, storing and chasing those CO2 emissions.

Instead of genuflecting to the boom-bust heavily mechanized Big Coal industry -- strip mining strips jobs, using explosives and bulldozers instead of miners -- why isn't Chu helping coalfield communities get their fair share of the clean energy jobs, investment funds for clean energy manufacturing, and advocating for a G.I. Bill for coal miners and former coal miners, to get education and retraining, and help launch the weatherization programs with electricians, plumbers, construction workers, or massive reforestation programs with the same bulldozer drivers?

It's been a long and twisted journey for the Nobel Prize-winning physicist and Energy secretary.

At his Senate confirmation hearings last year, Chu tempered his view of coal to "a bad dream."

This week, as elections heat up for Democrats in West Virginia, Chu declared: "We are the Saudi Arabia of coal... No one is going to turn their back on coal. The issue is how to use coal in a clean way."

Unfortunately, Sec. Chu, over 200 years of experience for those of us who live in the Saudi Arabia of coal have demonstrated that coal can never be mined or burned in a clean way.